We just released the WebJobs SDK Beta ! Some highlights: ServiceBus support! Better configuration options. You can pass in an ITypeLocator to specify which types are indexed, and an INameResolver to resolve %key% tokens in the attributes to values...

I constantly get burned by naming rules for azure storage. Here’s a collection of the naming rules from MSDN. The Storage client libraries don’t help you with these rules and just give you a 400 if you get them wrong. Fortunately, WebJobs SDK will provide...

We just previewed a Redis cache service on Azure . A good writeup is also on ScottGu’s blog . This is Redis hosted within azure as service. You can create a cache via the portal, and then access it via Some highlights: Hosting Redis 2.8 on Azure...

Azure WebJobs SDK alpha 2 makes it very easy to host code in the cloud and run it interactively. You can now invoke your SDK functions directly from the dashboard . Some great uses here: Provide admin diagnostic commands for your live site. Easily...

This blog post was made during the early previews of the SDK. Some of the features/ APIs have changed. For the latest documentation on WebJobs SDK, please see this link http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-webjobs-resources...

One of my favorite features of the Azure WebJobs SDK is the “Who wrote this blob?” feature. This is a common debugging scenario: you see your output is incorrect (in this case, a blob) and you’re trying to find the culprit that wrote the bad output. On...

I previously described how the Azure Webjobs SDK can bind to Blobs . This entry describes binding to Azure Queues. ( Binding to Service Bus Queues is not yet implemented ) You can see some more examples for queue usage on the sample...

The Azure WebJobs SDK provides model binding between C# BCL types and Azure storage like Blobs, Tables, and Queues. The SDK has a JobHost object which reflects over the functions in your assembly. So your main looks like this: static void Main(...

We recently an alpha for WebJobs SDK (aka AzureJobs , and internally codenamed “SimpleBatch”). In this blog entry, I wanted to explain how Triggers, Bindings, and Route Parameters worked in AzureJobs. A function can be “triggered” by some event such as...

This blog post describes how developers can do local development using the recently announced an alpha release of WebJobs SDK (aka SimpleBatch) . The client side code is just pulling down JobHost class from the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Jobs.Host nuget package...

We’ve released an alpha of “WebJobs SDK”, a simple framework that makes it crazy easy to write code that runs on Azure and binds against azure storage. (The project was internally codenamed “SimpleBatch” and also known amongst a few as “Project...

In light of the upcoming Hackathon , it’s worth noting there’s a lot of great free Microsoft offerings to help with hackathons, including excellent integration with open source technologies (like PHP, Python, GIT). A lot of these are cloud based and so...

There’s a Hackathon at the Microsoft main campus on Dec 6th / 7th . $5000 in prizes, Free registration , and food is included! This is a 24-hour crash session to put your skills to use and go build some awesome ideas. It’s put on by LincolnLabs...

I found the documentation for AttribuetUsageAttribute to be very ambiguous, particularly regarding the Inherited property. Here’s a quick test on the behavior of the AttributeUsage.Inherited flag. This affects how the attribute is queried via GetCustomerAttributes...

Here are some old notes I had about Reflection vs. the raw IMetadata Import interfaces. They’re from a while ago (before CLR 4.0 was shipped!), but still relevant. Better to share late than never! Quick reminder on the two APIs I’m comparing here: Reflection...

I published a nuget package ( CsvTools.Azure ) to easily read/write CSVs to azure blobs and tables. It builds on the CSV reader , also on Nuget (see CsvTools ) and GitHub ( https://github.com/MikeStall/DataTable ). Azure Tables are very powerful...

I updated my open source CSV reader to provide parsing rows back into strongly typed objects. You can get it from Nuget as CsvTools 1.0.6. For example, suppose we have a CSV file “test.csv” like so: name, species, favorite fruit, score Kermit,...

I wrote about WebAPI’s parameter binding at a high level before. Here’s what’s happening under the hood. The most fundamental object for binding parameters from a request in WebAPI is a HttpParameterBinding . This binds a single parameter. The binding...

I amended my open-source CsvTools with an Excel reader. Once I read the excel worksheet into a datatable, I can use all the data table operators from the core CsvTools, including enumeration, Linq over the rows, analysis, mutation, and saving back out...

Here’s how you can easily customize WebAPI parameter binding to include values from source other than the url. The short answer is that you add a custom ValueProvider and use Model Binding, just like in MVC. ValueProviders are used to provide values...

MVC provides several ways for binding your own arbitrary parameter types. I’ll describe some common MVC ways and then show how this applies to WebAPI too. You can view this as a MVC-to-WebAPI migration guide. (Related reading: How WebAPI binds...

I described earlier how WebAPI binds parameters . The entire parameter binding behavior is determined by the IActionValueBinder interface and can be swapped out. The default implementation is DefaultActionValueBinder. Here’s another IActionValueBinder...

Here’s an overview of how WebAPI binds parameters to an action method. I’ll describe how parameters can be read, the set of rules that determine which technique is used, and then provide some examples. [ update ] Parameter binding is ultimately...